The Landscape Has Changed

There are people who are still not ready to let go of Google Reader. But, just as Apple removes ports and drives that we still hold dear, it’s often done because they see another way to accomplish the same goal (and/or would like to push in that direction).

Why is it harder to find blog indexing (Technorati), aggregating tools (Yahoo Pipes), and RSS readers (Google Reader)? Because the landscape has changed and splintered in new social media directions. It’s messier now and more complex.

With a switch in themes, WordPress can run a website (and it feels like half the web these days runs on it). Tumblr can be a tool for teenagers to post angsty photos or for faculty to promote their new book. Medium hosts writing of all types, but is also where the White House chose to post this year’s State of the Union for the first time it was shared widely before the speech. Facebook and especially Twitter are very different things to different people.

It’s not that blogs don’t still exist, it’s just that the platforms have proliferated and evolved, the distinctions have become fuzzy of what goes where, and the barrier to start creating content is near zero. The notion that the authority of a single author or small group of authors on a singular platform can easily be aggregated, ranked, filtered, and organized seems near impossible now.

Different platforms have different restrictions and norms about length and visibility of content. Authors often syndicate their material and may use different platforms for different purposes, some mixing personal and professional content, some keeping it separate by tool.

The bottom line is that the moment when we could wrap our heads around this “new-fangled Internet writing”, which was bypassing traditional routes of monographs and peer reviewed journals, but that still looked and felt like something familiar, seems to have passed.

It’s All About Context

Everything is everything now. Why is it hard to delineate good or authoritative places to find useful material? Because these are just tools and everyone chooses individually how to use them, sometimes on a daily basis. And we’re all continuing to expand the wide variety of reasons and ways to use them.

What does this mean for the student/researcher trying to mine the Internet for useful content? It means you can’t rely on old tropes of authority (you know the ones: .edu .org and .gov domains are more authoritative than .com). It means there’s no easy “authority” filter button to click in the left column. And even taking a second to see an author’s credentials isn’t enough. What mode are they speaking in? Is there sarcasm you’re missing? What are they responding to, and what was that responding to? These are the skills we need to teach: being constantly evaluative of what you’re reading.

There’s great content in Wikipedia and there’s junk. There’s great content on Medium and there’s junk. There’s great content on Twitter and there’s junk. It’s on you to dig deeper and understand not just who is speaking and gauge their authority, but also ask questions about whether this platform involves collaboration or editing or not, continually trying to establish and ascertain context for what you’re seeing.

Old Attempts and New to Organize

This isn’t to say there aren’t attempts to create new scholarly blog indexes. To be honest, I find tools like that and other ones that hope to index and sell the open web a bit off-putting. It seems like they’re taking freely available content, repackaging it, and selling it, usually without permission.

Likewise, the efforts of LexisNexis and others to somehow incorporate blogs or social media as an additional category of their search always seemed a bit desperate and out of touch to me.

Ultimately, it’s the question of who is the part and who is the whole. It seems pretty clear at this point that academic literature is the part and the Internet is the whole, not the other way around, despite what vendors would prefer. We might still continue the debate about Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia on editorial method and authority grounds, but there is no question when it comes to breadth.

Like it or not, the scholarly world of information is part of the larger world of information, not the other way around. It makes sense that our searching strategies and practice begin to reflect that.

The Community is the Index

So, what’s the best tool for finding and searching through scholarly blogs? Google, I guess.

But I wouldn’t really recommend it.

That ignores the point of the shift towards social media. Instead of searching and ranking, I’d recommend tapping into the community that interests you. Follow people in your field on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook. They’ll lead you to the good blog posts, the good caches of primary sources in your field, the experts who’ve written a book on your topic. And if there’s a question they’re not addressing: you can just ask.

The best thing about moving from the broadcaster/receiver model of blogs/aggregator to the swirling mess of participatory social media is that the community is the index. Expertise and authority is not derived from a vendor’s designation or a tool’s algorithm, but through community opinion and your real experience.

Without blog indexes it may be harder to filter the good writing from all of the noise, but only when you stay on the outside of social media. And it certainly is more work for students to have to individually decipher the value of every piece of content, rather than using a simplistic rubric or relying on a vendor’s designation. But, once you create an account and actually start participating, you’ll quickly find new and more nuanced ways to assign value and authority.

Arguably, this is what Librarians should spend our time pondering and helping students to explore: not cut-and-dry rules about evaluation or putting up walls to delineate good sites and not good sites, but considering how to actively and ethically participate in this conversation, how to develop your own method for individually evaluating every piece of content you encounter, regardless of the source or format.

I’m curious to have a conversation about what students and faculty in the department have found valuable (and not), some of the logistics of the different tools, and the practicalities of taking control of your own “academic brand.” So I conducted a short survey among the grad students and post-docs for a quick snapshot of current practice.

Social Networks

90% on Facebook75% on Twitter55% on LinkedIn35% on Instagram30% on Pinterest

Use of Social Networks

Slidesharing

1 Respondent uses Prezi to share slides
All others do not share via Prezi, Slideshare, or other

Academic Website

15% maintain an academic website/blog/portfolio

Non-academic Website

20% maintain a website/blog not related to their academic work

Website/Blog Platform

Of those with an academic or non-academic site:2 use hosted WordPress.com2 use self-hosted WordPress (own domain)3 use TumblrNo one is using the BC Personal Webserver

Some Interesting Thoughts

“Twitter has been most useful for professional networking.”

“…as an academic I am also highly protective of works in progress…”

“There are also downsides to promoting oneself as X type of scholar when on the job market when one might be applying for a job seeking Y type of scholar.”

“I had heard that it was unwise to make papers/syllabi available for open download. I had also heard during the job search process that personal websites can seem self-aggrandizing…”

“My main reason for not crafting more of an online presence is simple wariness and lack of knowledge around what would be the best things for me to use…”

“I tend to use Twitter for professional use, and Facebook purely for personal use. That distinction is very important for me.”

“My only professional account is my twitter one, which I use only for posts related to my subject. I post or repost multiple times daily and have managed to build over 5,000 followers, but partly that’s because I realized that pictures with captions are what Twitter is really about.”

“I’m mostly a private online person…it seems like when you’re on the job market, the internet can be very permanent.”

“I work part-time at the Burns Library and regularly post to the Burns Library Blog…it’s an opportunity to publicize some research skills and especially to develop a public voice.”

“I think it’s important to cultivate an online presence even as a grad student, if only because it’s good practice for maintaining a web presence later…”

“I see my very limited online presence mainly as a means of sharing and acquiring ideas for teaching and for staying up to date on conferences, scholarship…I don’t foresee creating my own website, as I’d rather devote the time…to my teaching and research.”

“I’m most interested in using my online presence to interact with people interested in teaching/studying history from outside the academy, but I’ve yet to see many examples of how to do this successfully.”

Option A (simpler)

Drag and drop placeholder citations into Scrivener, using the footnotes pane (create the empty footnote first)

Note: these will only bring the main part of the citation, you’ll need to add page numbers manually. For example change this: {Longford, 2006} to this: {Longford, 2006, 10-14}

Compile or export from Scrivener as an RTF file

Process the file in Zotero (cog wheel -> RTF Scan…)

Open the new version of the file in Word and you should have properly formatted footnotes and a bibliography

Option B

The main downside of Option A is that it does not maintain a live connection to your Zotero library. Once you process the RTF file, the footnotes and bibliography are essentially plain text, not connected to your Zotero database. But this is probably fine if you prefer to work on your text inside Scrivener, and only export and process the footnotes when you are finished. Any changes could then be made to the Scrivener version and processed again.

If you prefer to maintain the live connection to your Zotero library, including allowing for the reverse process, you can download the RTF/ODF-Scan plugin for Zotero. Adding citations to Scrivener works similarly to Option A. But, instead of exporting as an RTF file, you will need to export as an ODT file. Then you can process the file in Zotero as before.

One other key difference: you will need to open and work with the processed document using a Microsoft Word alternative, either LibreOffice or OpenOffice. You should now have a document with footnotes -and- a live connection allowing you to change/reformat them via Zotero.

I’m frequently asked how to import an already created bibliography (in Word or a pdf) into Zotero.

Perhaps surprisingly, there is no way to directly import text bibliographies into Zotero.

The best workaround, to be sure you import your full bibliography, is to add it item by item using isbn or doi, or by finding the citations in WorldCat or other databases and importing them to your local Zotero library.

However, if you have a large bibliography and double-checking for errors would be preferable to adding item by item, you could try processing your bibliography into a format Zotero can read with a third-party tool.

Some of these tools are free and hosted right on the web. Just be sure to closely review the final output.

Working with history faculty and students, I’m often faced with tough research questions, confusion about BC resources or services, and interest in new digital tools. All of these can take some effort to explore. I hope to use this space to document what we discover, creating and sharing some institutional memory.